Inculcation of the Russian as Lingua Franca in Azerbaijan in the Midwar Period

Abstract

The influence of the Russian language over the territory of Azerbaijanian SSR and also over the Azerbaijanian itself is quite important but in the same time not common topic in the historiography. The main idea of the paper, despite the systematic introduction about the main point of development of the influence process, is to represent the russification as a process mostly “from below” rather than central planed one. Despite the full power of the Communist party and the slow advance of the russification wave, neither Moscow or Baku wanted and placed serious efforts of establishing a monolingual sphere and total dominance of the Russian in the region. Its main goal is to be fully administrative languages and to serve as a garantpost about keypoints in the state structure – army, students and culture. Even in the late 1930s successful achievements about some of these tasks could not be practically seen.